Many different designs of field installable modular telephone connectors have been proposed. The desirable characteristics of a field installable telephone connector include a minimal size, ease of assembly and reliable termination of the connector to telephone wires.
Modular telephone connectors typically include a plurality of interlocking parts including a housing that defines a standard telephone jack, a contact carrier that carries and positions a plurality of insulation displacement contacts for termination to a plurality of wires and a wire positioning fixture that positions individual wires for termination within each respective insulation displacement contact. The housing and contact carrier can be formed integrally but are usually manufactured separately and preassembled to form a housing/wire carrier unit that presents the insulation displacement contacts for receipt of the telephone wires when the wire positioning fixture is assembled to the housing and contact carrier.
The wire positioning fixture is typically secured to the housing/wire carrier by peripheral latching structural features that cooperate with structural features formed on the housing/ contact carrier. See FIG. 3 of U.S. Pat. No. 4,657,332 to Levy. Connectors that utilize a plurality of peripherally disposed latching structural features to secure the wire positioning fixture to the housing/contact carrier, if both latching features of the fixture are not carefully brought into engagement concurrently with corresponding latching features of the housing resulting, can be misaligned during assembly resulting in a faulty termination of the wires to the contacts.
An additional problem caused by faulty assembly of certain multipart modular telephone connectors is the possibility of a short between the distal end of a terminated wire and an adjacent telephone jack contact resulting in a defective connector termination.
The known field installable telephone connectors have not eliminated the chance of defective termination due to improper assembly of field installable telephone connectors and thus leave room for improvement in the art.